03301 Ark-Vol 2 September 5 2pm DL

CHAPTER 19 | 1946–1949 – Return to Normality

Brothers) lost his step on the winery’s skeleton floor – a latticework of thick beams – and fell to his death. An obituary in the Adelaide Advertiser noted, ‘Mr Kay was one of the grand old men of the industry and his judgement was relied upon by the younger generations’. Less than a year later, Bert Kay, among the second generation of Kays, died. The brothers’ partnership of 57 years mirrored the golden age of Australian burgundy and the rise in fortified wine production powered by the 1924 Export Bounty Act . But post-war Australia offered new opportunities and challenges. Following a long drought in 1947, an ex-Royal Airforce pilot, Cliff Richards, of Edgecliff, spruiked to the wine industry a method of rainmaking using dry ice. Penfolds offered him a £200 bounty on success. On the 22nd of September 1947, Sydney’s Sun newspaper reported in, ‘Aviator Says He Made Rain on Mountains’, that with a cargo of dry ice, Richards ‘took his Avro Anson plane on a rainmaking expedition over Penfolds’ vineyards in the Katoomba–Prospect area’ (Minchinbury). Every cloud in a 30-by-3-mile area was seeded, with no result. Although Richards claimed that some rainfall over a small area in the Blue Mountains was the result of his experiments, no rain fell over any of Penfolds’ vineyards. Richards said, ‘Although the Minchinbury Vineyards reported that at one stage the weather was very threatening, the storm passed over’. After this apparent failure, he installed a bombsight to work out the correct speed and direction of the wind, but his project was abandoned soon after. In 1947, South Australia accounted for 80% of Australia’s wine production, highlighting the diminished contribution of Victoria and New South Wales during the first half of the 20th century. The government’s social and economic engineering had forced wine producers to either adapt or fail. Of course, one of the key contributors to the changing face of Australian wine was the wine export bounty, which had encouraged producers to make fortified wines for the United Kingdom market. Introduced in 1924 to save the wine industry after World War I, it was abolished in 1947. Instead, the federal government began to support scientific research. The earlier lack of funding meant winemaking challenges had gone unchecked, with problems of microbiological spoilage in fortified wines during storage causing wineries to throw out large volumes. Zygosaccharomyces and Dekkera (Brettanomyces) yeasts had already been isolated and identified in beer during the 1920s, but the wine industry had lagged behind and was not helped by wineries keeping their individual research a secret. For instance, Ray Beckwith’s 1936 discovery of how to achieve wine stability through pH monitoring and adjustment was kept a strict secret by Penfolds. The discovery of nematodes, a microscopic roundworm that attacks the vine, by Doug Quinn of the CSIRO’s Wahgunyah Research Station in 1947, opened a new front of pest control: using nematode-resistant rootstocks. Heavy infestations

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